Enhancing 802.11ac Dynamic Access method for Increasing the Throughput of Low Priority Access Categories BK and BE

Abstract

Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) are becoming an essential form of communication in our life, and they have known a strong history of development. The current IEEE 802.11ac technology aims at achieving a Very High Throughput (VHT), by utilizing wider channels 80 and 160 MHz. The wide channels are obtained by bonding adjacent 20 MHz sub-channels. This is why, Static and Dynamic Multichannel Access (SMA and DMA) methods are proposed for controlling such multichannel transmissions. SMA and DMA guarantee the requirements of Quality of Service (QoS) for VHT WLANs, by following the existing 802.11e Enhanced Distributed Channel Access (EDCA). However, EDCA still suffers from the starvation among low priority ACs. Although several enhancements have been proposed since the emergence of the starvation issue, none of the proposed research works have addressed the critical state of low priority ACs BestEffort (BE) and BacKground (BK) under wide channels. In this paper, we propose to enhance the DMA method, in order to improve the multichannel access efficience and hence increase the throughputs of BK and BE. The obtained simulation results demonstrate the contribution of the Starvation resolution within the DMA method (SDMA) for increasing the throughputs of low priority ACs while maintaining the throughputs of high priority ACs.